Customer Service Department of the Year – Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals and Related Industries

Kneat Solutions, Use Kneat to digitize and manage any validation, commissioning or qualification process. A complete solution that can scale to meet all your validation needs across all of your facilities globally.

Briefly describe the nominated department: history and past performance (up to 1,250 characters):

Kneat Solutions, founded in 2007, enables Life Sciences organizations to digitize and automate validation and compliance processes. Our flagship platform, Kneat Gx, is now trusted by eight of the world's ten largest Life Sciences companies to support GMP and other regulated activities where accuracy, traceability, and reliability are essential.

The Customer Technical Support (CTS) team ensures these critical operations run without interruption. Evolving from a two-person function into a global department of fourteen highly skilled engineers, CTS is now strategically located across Ireland, APAC, and the United States. This structure enables a true follow-the-sun support model, delivering 24/5 coverage for P2-P4 issues and continuous 24/7/365 on-call support for P1 incidents with potential business impact.

The team focuses not only on resolving issues quickly, but on maintaining trusted, long-term customer relationships. Since implementing formal CSAT scoring in July 2023, CTS has sustained an average customer satisfaction rating of 4.85/5. Between January 2023 and January 2025, the team achieved a 91.28% overall Service Level against a 90% target and consistently met all first-response SLAs throughout 2024 and into 2025.

By combining global availability, validated industry expertise, strong performance metrics, and a customer-first mindset, CTS has established itself as a reliable partner to organizations operating in heavily regulated environments.

Outline the department's achievements since July 1, 2023 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 1,500 characters):

Since July 2023, the CTS team has maintained strong operational performance while introducing improvements that enhance the customer experience and modernise our support model. To expand customer choice and accessibility, new support channels were launched. Webforms now simplify ticket creation and ensure essential details are captured, while toll-free phone support for urgent issues was introduced across the U.S., EU, and South Korea, giving customers direct access to an engineer when they need it most.

We also invested heavily in self-service. The Knowledge Base was upgraded with clearer navigation, new how-to content, video guides, and real-time patch notes. This enables customers to resolve straightforward issues faster, reducing wait times and improving productivity.

Communication processes were strengthened through standardised patch and upgrade notifications, helping customers plan more effectively within regulated environments.

Internal workflow has also improved. A new sub-ticket process speeds collaboration on complex cases, while regular trend reviews and root-cause analysis help prevent recurring issues.

These changes were delivered while sustaining outstanding performance, a 4.85/5 CSAT score, 91.28% Service Level, and 100% of first-response SLAs met, reinforcing CTS as a trusted partner in critical healthcare and pharmaceutical operations.

Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 1,500 characters):

The significance of our achievements becomes clear when looking at our starting point. In 2023, despite strong customer relationships, our Service Level target of 90% was missed in nine of twelve months, a clear signal that our operating model needed to evolve.

The team responded with a structured improvement plan in early 2024, focused on simplifying workflows, improving collaboration, and strengthening consistency. The impact has been substantial. Service Level compliance rose from just 25% in 2023 to over 90% in 2024, with only one month below target. Average full-resolution time was reduced from 1,339 hours in 2021 to just 13.5 hours in 2025, and CSAT increased from 4.65 to 4.85 out of 5.

Customer feedback echoed this transformation. A Global Director at a Top 10 pharmaceutical company noted that Kneat "made it very easy to align existing processes and move to digitalization with the same procedure and template across all sites." Others highlighted improved traceability, collaboration, and responsiveness, all direct outcomes of CTS improvements.

This progress has continued into 2025, with the team maintaining 100% SLA compliance year-to-date. Achieving this level of consistency in a complex, regulated sector reflects the maturity and discipline of the team.

To put this in context, widely cited support benchmarks report an average CSAT of 78% across industries. CTS consistently delivers the equivalent of 97% customer satisfaction, placing the team among the top-performing support organizations globally and demonstrating a cultural shift toward accountability, continuous improvement, and exceptional customer outcomes in Life Sciences.

Supporting diagrams that illustrate these improvements, including Service Level agreement targets, resolution-time reductions, and satisfaction trends, are included in the Attachments section of this submission.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 1,500 characters):

The attachments included with this nomination provide clear evidence of the operational improvements, customer sentiment, and performance trends described.

Attachment A - CTS Overview Presentation

This PowerPoint explains the role of the Customer Technical Support team within Kneat's wider Customer Service, Training, and Support organisation. It outlines our global coverage model, workflows and escalation paths, demonstrating how CTS safeguards validated, business-critical operations.

Attachment B - Industry Recognition

A slide sourced from G2 shows Kneat as a Leader in Market Presence and a High Performer in Customer Satisfaction, with 94% support quality ratings, supporting our claim of trusted service in a regulated industry.

Attachment C - Kneat KPI and CSAT Attachments KPI Dashboards and Trend Charts

A complete set of SLA, CSAT, first-response, and resolution-time charts from 2023-2025 provides a transparent visual record of performance improvements:

• SLA turnaround from inconsistent achievement in 2023 (Fig. 1a) to sustained compliance in 2024 (Fig. 1b) and 100% YTD in 2025 (Fig. 1c)
• CSAT performance consistently above 90% since July 2023 (Figs. 2a-2c), compared with a 78% industry average
• Continuous improvement across all operational KPIs (Figs. 3a-3c) Customer Feedback Extracts

Direct CSAT survey comments highlight responsiveness, technical expertise, and confidence in the support provided, reinforcing how process and performance improvements are experienced by customers.

Together, these attachments substantiate the claims in this nomination with visual evidence of measurable results and customer-validated success.